Funding Russian NGOs: opportunity in a crisis?

Russian NGOs have traditionally looked abroad for their
funding, and are dismayed at recent legislation setting up new barriers to this
practice. Almut Rochowanski argues, however, that this should be seen as a
challenge to increase the involvement of the Russian public in the development
of civil society.

Russian civil
society had not yet recovered from the upheaval caused by the notorious ‘foreign
agent’ law
(which requires organizations receiving funds from foreign donors and engaging
in ‘political activities’ to declare themselves foreign agents), when the
so-called Dima Yakovlev bill, signed
into law by President Putin on December 28, delivered yet another blow: organizations
receiving funding from the US and engaging in ‘political activities’ would
simply have ‘their activities stopped’.

‘Stopped’
is, it seems, to be read as ‘temporarily halted’; the law has provision for an
NGO to resume its work after it has discontinued its offending activities and
renounced US funding. But even with this less than final threat, the spectre of
months and years of frozen accounts, sealed offices and prolonged court battles
is just about the worst-case scenario for the average Russian NGO. This newest
law was adopted as a retaliatory measure for the US’s Magnitsky Act
and, not surprisingly, reeks of mean-spirited hostility. It’s the same law that
prohibits US adoptions of Russian children – the bill was named after a Russian
child who died after adoption by an American couple.

Both NGO laws were tabled, loudly (but pointlessly) protested against by
organisations big and small, passed after the required readings and signed into
law with lightning speed. The Foreign Agent law was criticized for being vague
and for initially lacking procedures and timelines for implementation. Even
now, no one can say with any authority what ‘political activities’ really
means, with several competing theories out there, based on analysis of other
legislation. The day the Foreign Agent law entered into force, 21st November, one
especially enterprising organization sued
the Ministry of Justice for not providing adequate clarifications. Legal
experts have argued that the notion of activists having to call themselves ‘foreign
agents’ is not just absurd,
but possibly illegal – because the government cannot force you to call yourself
something you’re not.

Some
of the most eminent Russian human rights leaders have expressed robust reactions,
ranging from ‘well, then we won’t take any foreign grants anymore and just work
for free, as we did in the dissident days’ to ‘we will simply refuse to comply
and let them arrest us’. Litigation has been announced, all the way to the
European Court of Human Rights. Predictably, the bulk of the debate has been
about the new political era under Putin’s second presidency and dark hints about
a return to Soviet-era repression. All that may well be a distraction. There is
a much greater issue here, one that begs for a big, broad debate: why is it
that so much of Russia’s civil society, and especially the human rights sector,
is funded by foreign donors, and overwhelmingly or indeed exclusively so? Isn’t
that somehow problematic? What does this mean for the authenticity, the
rootedness of NGOs’ values and work, their relationship with the Russian public,
the authority they can hope to have with their fellow citizens?

Agents – whose agents?

Let’s be
quite clear. In reality, Russian NGOs that take grants from foreign donors (probably
a majority of NGOs that have any funding at all) are not in any way, shape or
form ‘agents’ of anyone. Their donors never tell them what to do. They really
don’t. Anyone who has been on the inside of this process knows this. Plus,
grant application processes are highly complicated and competitive, especially
for the majority of smaller or local NGOs that are not in the exclusive club of
established donor favourites. A foreign government looking to recruit agents
would surely not force them to write dozens of pages, answer convoluted, jargon-heavy
questions, let alone complete a log frame; and then, when reporting time comes
around, make them submit every taxi receipt (try getting a receipt from a taxi
driver in any Russian city…).

'Why
is it that so much of Russia’s civil society, and especially the human rights
sector, is funded by foreign donors? What does this mean for the authenticity,
the rootedness of NGOs’ values and work, their relationship with the Russian
public, the authority they can hope to have with their fellow citizens?'

Most donors
active in Russia are neither governments nor the kind of huge, ambitious
foundations (e.g. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations or the MacArthur
Fund) that figure so prominently in cherished conspiracy theories. They are
small Trusts, family foundations, religious charities, funds that raise their money
painstakingly from ordinary citizens in countries like Italy or Sweden. And as
is perfectly obvious to anyone who has spent time around the Russian activists
who take these grants, these people are driven by their own ideas and dreams
and are as stubborn as can be in their pursuit. They wouldn’t make good agents
for anyone else’s agenda.

Finding donors who share your aims…

But still, there
is a very real problem here. For anyone who has ever been faced with the
desperate task of keeping an NGO funded, the term ‘donor-driven’ isn’t just an
abstract concept that you can ignore. It’s what happens to some degree every
time you sit down to tackle yet another application form (and that may be many
times a year, because the competition is fierce and the grant amounts small).
You need to come up with the rent to keep the place open, pay your accountant a
little bit here and there so she doesn’t altogether abandon you and somehow
find a way to meet your beneficiaries’ desperate needs.

In the back
of your head, or saved on some battered flash drive, you have your dream
project, exactly the kind that your neighbourhood needs – catch-up education
for kids who have dropped out of school. But this donor won’t fund them. This
donor, this year, wants to ‘empower marginalized youth through integrating them
into global youth activism networks’. The donor wants social media, internet video,
diversity among the beneficiaries. This year, LGBT youth would be great, the
donor says (last year the donor wanted youth from Muslim minorities). All very
nice ideas and not too far removed from what your organization does.

And so you
and your colleagues think up a project idea, write 15 pages in answer to some
25 different questions and complete a complex budget spreadsheet, and after
waiting for half a year you are thrilled to find out that you beat out the
competition and will receive $16,794. That same year, a few more donors open
calls for proposals that are heavy on video and social media (though none for
those basic educational programs the kids in your neighbourhood could really
use), and so you apply a few more times. You win one more grant. Victory! You
have managed to keep the doors open and the lights on. The social
media/video/marginalized youth projects actually turned out pretty good. You’re
very proud of your beneficiaries and the earnest videos they produced, and you
check their Youtube hits obsessively. The project netted you some keen young
volunteers and an invitation to a workshop on internet hate speech in Ukraine,
where you met other activists from all over the former Soviet Union. Your
organization is getting quite good at this!

'Your dream project,
exactly what your neighbourhood needs, is catch-up education for school
drop-outs. The donor wants social media, internet video, diversity among the
beneficiaries. This year, LGBT youth would be great…'

It’s pretty
obvious what’s happening here. Organizations may be founded by dedicated,
selfless, driven people who have identified a need in their community or
country and will do what they can to address it. But institutional donors
usually have their own ideas, based on their own analysis and sometimes,
especially with private foundations, on whims or esoteric theories. Not that
they’re necessarily wrong. They’re just looking at it from a different angle.
Certainly not from within the community.

…or matching your aims to those of the
donors

Some
organizations are a perfect match for those donors from the start, because they
happen to be of the same mind anyway. These organizations will grow and thrive,
and their voices will become louder. But their increasing clout has not come from
having their own community behind them and their cause. Some organizations are
flexible (mercenary, others might grumble, but they’re just jealous…) and good
at finding ways of extending themselves into where the money is, and so
gradually their mission, beliefs, even their staff, change. Those organizations,
however, whose missions happen not to coincide with the priorities of foreign donors
and who are too stubborn or not savvy enough make them coincide - they get no
funding, stay small or go under. No one’s being an agent of anyone, but even
so, the influence of foreign donors on Russia’s civil society (and anywhere
else where there are similar funding dynamics) is having a clearly distorting impact.
Distorting in the sense that certain discourses, often developed outside Russia
and of limited relevance to the Russian public, get amplified, while locally
articulated priorities and opinions will often remain neglected and anaemic.

Organizations
can lose sight of the mandate from their communities in this way. There is even
a term for this, ‘constituency confusion’: giving more attention to the
interests of the donors than to those of their fellow citizens around them. Some
activists, of course, won’t lose the connection with the community no matter
what, especially those that provide direct services and are daily confronted
with the real needs of real people. But then again, providing services is not a
favourite among international donors operating in Russia – not dynamic enough, doesn’t
create the much-cited ‘change’, too pedestrian.

'The influence of foreign donors on
Russia’s civil society is having a clearly distorting impact, in the sense that
certain discourses, often developed outside Russia and of limited relevance to
the Russian public, get amplified, while locally articulated priorities and
opinions will often remain neglected.'

But what
about those organizations that do not deliver services, that have no direct beneficiaries
among the public, that engage in research, documentation, raising awareness about
issues? When such an organization gets its funding in the form of a few large
grants from major institutional donors, it can easily find itself in an echo
chamber, surrounded by like-minded elites with whom it gradually develops a
somewhat unhealthy symbiotic relationship: the grantee produces reports and
documentation which the donor agency uses to inform its analysis of
grant-making priorities.

Russian NGOs: estranged from the
Russian public?

A significant
segment of Russian civil society, including many of the ‘classic’ human rights
organizations, has become locked into such an ivory tower of its own making,
because for 20 years generous foreign funding allowed them to pursue
programming for which there was little or no demand from the community, little
or no understanding, even, in much of the public and quite often indeed
hostility. This programming had clear merit, was even essential in many ways,
and was informed by unimpeachable moral principles. But because it never had to
be paid for by the public it also never had to be ‘sold’ to them – except
through ‘awareness-raising programs’, which tend to consist mostly of stacks of
brochures that gather dust on the shelves of other NGOs.

Of course,
the Russian public is a less gushing constituency than those NGOs’ donors and
other assorted cheerleaders abroad. Your donors and the people they like to show
you off to - diplomats, parliamentarians, journalists and think tankers - always
welcome you, even adore you, although many of them have only the vaguest idea
of what you really do. At their receptions, there is a lot of talk of how brave
and how brilliant you are, and eager agreement with everything you say and do.
There are the perky conferences, fellowships and award ceremonies, but best of
all, all those friendly foreigners who share your ideas and have nothing but
admiration and respect for your work. It’s all quite different from the
harassment by the security services at home, the smear campaigns on local TV,
the hateful graffiti
on your building, the indifference of your old classmates to your life’s work,
the sour look on your mother’s face when she tells you about her neighbour’s
son’s new Mercedes, and the general hardship of being an activist in Russia.

It has been
somewhat uncomfortable watching Russia’s most eminent human rights activists
flapping helplessly in the wake of the ‘foreign agents’ law and the September
2012 announcement
that USAID would have to stop making grants in Russia. Their reactions betray not
only their degree of estrangement from their supposed constituents, but also just
how comfortable they have become with an arrangement in which large grants from
major foreign donors have been available to them with little or no competition.
They defend themselves, sullenly, against the well-meant suggestion that they
should try to raise funds from Russian donors, by griping that ever since the imprisonment
of Khodorkovsky, no other wealthy donors or businesses would dare support an
independent human rights organization.

‘We never even asked people for
donations’

This only
goes to show how warped their perception of civil society financing has become.
Where is it written that all funding has to be in the form of big, five- or
six-figure (and that’s in dollars or Euros) grants, from oligarch types? What
about ‘nickel and diming’ it from the man (and woman) on the street – which is how
the West’s most successful NGOs raise the fastest-growing of their funds. Until
quite recently, most of the websites of Russia’s superstar human rights NGOs
didn’t even feature a “click here to donate” button, let alone the insistent
messages asking for support that are so ubiquitous on Western NGOs’ websites,
their social media platforms and all-too frequent email appeals (the highly
effective ‘fundraising by attrition’ approach).

Russia’s
major human rights NGOs have lately put those ‘donate here’buttons on their website, but grudgingly, with the passive-aggressive
appearance of ‘we’re being forced to do this, but it won’t work, you’ll see’. There
is no culture of individual philanthropy in Russia, they complain. Isn’t that
at least in part the fault of the very organizations who should have been building
such a culture over the last 20 years? Yes, they admit, Russians will probably
spare some cash for big-eyed orphans and similarly attractive feel-good causes,
but never for controversial, misunderstood work like defending victims of
torture, let alone if they’re bearded men from the North Caucasus. This is a
common enough problem all over the world. There is a much-repeated statistic
that in the US there are more than twice as many shelters for abandoned pets
than for battered women. Fundraisers for controversial causes have to speak
louder, work harder, hone their arguments, win those man-and- woman-on-the-street
donors over, one by one, and then make sure they stay loyal.

'There has been no
concerted effort to turn the protesters into donors, or card-carrying members
of Memorial or the Moscow Helsinki Group, perhaps for 500 roubles a month
($15), the price of a latte and a muffin at Starbucks in Moscow.'

Much was made
of the demographic composition of the protest movement that emerged in Russia
in autumn 2011 and which brought such impressive numbers to the streets of
Moscow: young professionals with a good education and careers in Russia’s new
boom industries, earning salaries that wouldn’t look too shabby even in the
West. And yet, although Russia’s human rights movement shared the streets with
this new class of politically mobilized urbanites, no one seems to have tried to
tap them for their disposable income. 100,000 or more of them braved Moscow
winters - and worse! - for hours of demonstrating, yet there has been no
concerted effort to turn them into donors, or card-carrying members of Memorial
or the Moscow Helsinki Group, perhaps for 500 roubles a month ($15), the price
of a latte and a muffin at Starbucks in Moscow.

Even beyond
Moscow’s urban elites, Russians have money to spend these days. According to
the World Bank,
Russia’s 2011 per capita GDP was more than $21,000, about the same as those of the
Baltic States, Poland and Hungary. A better indication of ordinary Russians’
finances is median income, and today that’s approaching $1,000 a month. And
according to a recent article in the New
York Times, Russians’ income is truly ‘disposable’ – 60% of it is spent on
retail shopping, the highest rate anywhere in Europe by a large margin. At the
same time, there is a burst of informal philanthropy happening all over Russian
society. Much of it is old-fashioned, ‘widows-and-orphans’ stuff: pictures of
children with cancer on newspaper websites, people donating
food packages for flood victims. But there are signs that society is moving
faster than civil society when it comes to more strategic, civic-minded
philanthropy. The same enterprising human rights NGO that sued the Ministry of
Justice recently had a local man walk into its office in one of Russia’s
provincial cities, offering them $1,000 a month so they could keep up their
work. The equally enterprising young man at the helm of the organization told
me this with a mixture of bewilderment and a giddy realization that this is
their future. ‘We never even asked people for donations’, he said.

Putin may be to thank for waking up
the NGOs

It looks as
if the moment has come. Unwittingly, President Putin and his docileDuma may have forced the hand of
Russia’s human rights community and much of the rest of Russian civil society. In
a way, it’s a much-needed wake-up call. Funding from Western sources had been
getting less and less every year anyway. Eventually, it will come to an end.
Western donor countries are quite good at upping the volume on talk about human
rights and the democracy deficit in Russia while simultaneously winding down
their grant programmes there (most of them, unlike USAID, without even being forced
to do so). But like the proverbial boiling frog, Russian NGOs could have gone
on ignoring the signs until it was finally too late.

'Russia is quick to pick
up on the habits of consumer societies: expect soon to run into those annoying
charity muggers as you exit from the Moscow metro.'

Now, they
might just get serious about raising money from their fellow citizens, their neighbours,
the man and woman on the street. This is going to be a tough slog and some will
fall by the wayside. It will be all about clever communications with the public
and will require a massive effort to educate citizens about the meaning of citizen
philanthropy. About why it may be a better investment to give your 100 roubles
to a vocal public health advocacy outfit than to donate them to a kid with
cancer. About the pride and pleasure of being a card-carrying member of an
environmental movement or a network that fights against police abuse. About
taking responsibility for your community and country. The work of a generation,
perhaps, but then again, it’s about time, because one post-Soviet generation, the
one that grew old during the past 20 years, has already been lost to this task.
Russia is quick to pick up on the habits of consumer societies: expect soon to run
into those annoying charity muggers as you exit from the Moscow metro.

A human
rights movement that fundamentally trusts that the people are with them in
their belief in human rights, justice and democracy can survive these new laws.
Of course, some corners of Russia’s human rights movement are more prone instead
to suspicion of the people and contempt for their unenlightened state….But those
organizations that are open to revamping the way they operate will weather this
storm and come out stronger on the other side. They will have learned to listen
to the people and the full range of their concerns, and not just to continue
preaching at them. They will be more authentic voices of their communities, and
carry more authority among them at the same time. It will be much harder to
marginalize and vilify human rights defenders, to exclude them from public
discourse and to dismiss them as somehow ‘the other’, if behind them stand
thousands of card-carrying, paying members of the Russian public.

The legislators
and policy-makers who authored the Foreign Agent and Dima Yakovlev laws neither
intended nor foresaw this. They seem genuinely convinced that critical civil
society voices, and especially human rights activists, are indeed ‘agents’ –
hired hands who will fall silent the moment the funding runs dry; fraudulent
institutions that will deflate like popped balloons without their precious foreign
grants. But if Russian civil society rises to this new challenge, these
politicians are in for a rude awakening of their own.

Photo: Creative Commons / US AID

About the author

Almut Rochowanski is a co-founder and coordinator of Chechnya Advocacy Network, a US-based NGO.

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